New Real Estate Investor Checklist

It is easy to be overwhelmed when you first start out as a new real estate investor. Having a checklist can help. If you are a new student of mine and you are trying to figure out what you should do next then this checklist should help you out:

ATTEND ALL OF THE BOOT CAMPS

If you want to learn how to wholesale then you MUST attend the Wholesaling Real Estate Boot Camp. If you cannot attend the boot camp then you MUST watch ALL of the videos of the Wholesaling Real Estate Boot Camp on the training site (24 hours of video). This seems kind of obvious but you would be surprised how many students “skip” the boot camp and then wonder why they are having a hard time. The boot camp is where all of the information comes together. If you cannot attend then please at least watch the videos. My experience has been that most of students are not very likely to watch 24 hours of video sitting at home and will tend to watch an hour or two and then not continue or they will tend to skip forward to try and look for the “meat and potatoes”. If this is you then you will FAIL. There is no substitute for spending 3 full days with me LIVE at the boot camp teaching you. Having the ability to ask questions, and listening to the questions (and answers) of other students is key to understanding the concepts. Being able to chat with other students on the breaks is also very helpful for learning and for networking. If you are physically able to attend the boot camp then please make sure sure that you do so. Being able to ask questions, hearing other students questions, and networking and meeting other students is way more valuable than worrying about the cost of a plane ticket. If you have something in your calendar that prevents you from attending the next boot camp then please make sure you attend the boot camp after the one that you are missing. Our boot camps are held every six months. You can see the “events” tab on this page to see upcoming boot camp dates. If you are thinking to yourself “but I want to learn now and not wait 6 months” then I have an update for you. It will take you a minimum of 3 to 6 months to LEARN. So attending a boot camp in 6 months is BETTER for you than attending a boot camp a week after you signed up. There is a lot of material to absorb. That is why my best students have attended the boot camp multiple times. I have some students that have attended the boot camp 6 or 7 times. Try to read the Home Study Course, and the book “Wholesaling Bank Owned Properties” BEFORE you attend the boot camp. Login to the training site and watch the training’s BEFORE you attend the boot camp. If you do, then your learning experience at the BOOT CAMP will be that much better. You can see the events calendar for our boot camps by clicking on the “events” tab at the top right of this page. If you want to learn how to fix and flip houses then you MUST attend the Fixing and Flipping Houses Boot Camp. If you cannot attend the boot camp then you MUST watch ALL of the videos on the training site. There is no substitute for attending the event live, so unless you are not physically able to do so, I encourage you to attend the boot camp. I also like to meet every one of my new students and the boot camp is a great opportunity to do so.

JOIN THE NEW PRIVATE STUDENT ONLY FACEBOOK GROUP

Make sure you join our Private Student Only Flipping Real Estate Academy Group Page on Facebook. I personally post content in the “files” section of the Facebook Group and our Student Support Desk monitors the page during office hours (Mon to Fri 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.). I also often answer questions from students directly as well. The Facebook Group is a great place to learn and network with other students. You just got a house under contract? Share it! You just did your first deal? Share it! Confused about something? Ask questions! The Flipping Real Estate Academy Group on Facebook is only for registered students in our Partnership Program.

If you are one of those people who says “I don’t do Facebook” then you are missing out big time on a very valuable resource. It is the easiest way for me to personally communicate with all of you in a forum where everyone can participate.

READ THE HOME STUDY COURSE

I spent two years writing the Home Study Course. It is the best training out there. Make sure you READ IT! You Are not going to magically know the “secret sauce” if you don’t put in the time to read the Home Study Course and listen to the 6 Audio CD’s that come with it. When you first start out as a real estate investor one of the most difficult things to understand is the concept of “wholesale real estate”. Why would someone sell their house for less than what it is worth? How can you buy a house with no money down? How do you calculate After Repair Value? How much should you offer? READ THE HOME STUDY COURSE AND LISTEN TO THE 6 AUDIO CD’S that come with it.

The entire 3 day Wholesaling Boot Camp is on the training site. So is the 3 day Fixing and Flipping Houses Boot Camp. All of your questions about the Partnership Program, Proof of Funds Letters, How To Get Started are ON THE TRAINING SITE. Login daily even if it’s only for 1 hour a day. Make a commitment to watch one less hour of TV and spend one hour a day on the training site reading, learning and watching the videos. MAKE SURE YOU ASK QUESTIONS. Our support desk is there for a reason. If you have questions about ANYTHING then ask your question by posting it in the Facebook Group or by sending an email to our support desk at supportdesk at lexrealestategroup.com

USE OUR SUPPORT DESK

There is no such thing as a stupid question. If you don’t know something then ASK. Don’t try and be ” too proud” or worry about looking dumb. You paid money to learn how to flip houses. We have created the best damn program on the planet to help you do that. But you need to learn by doing and taking action. For example register for your proof of funds letter and make your first offer and I promise you that you will have lots of questions. Make sure you check out the FAQ on the training site. Many of your questions will be answered there.

If you have questions about ANYTHING then post your question in the Facebook Group or send an email to our support desk at:

supportdesk at lexrealestategroup.com

Remember that we do not offer phone support because we want to have all of your questions (and our staff’s responses) in writing so that we can monitor your questions (and the answers) to make sure that you are getting the right advice. If you want phone support then please sign up for one of our coaching programs like the Wholesaling Inner Circle or the Fixing and Flipping Houses Inner Circle.

MASTERMIND WITH OTHER STUDENTS

This is one of the biggest reason why you should attend our events in person. If you live in the area then make sure you attend our Real Estate Investment Club Meetings as well. Whatever city and state you live in their is a real estate investment club meeting. Just google Real Estate Investment Club and the name of your city or town or go to meetup.com and search “real estate” to find your local REIA meetings. Attend these meetings religiously and continue attending them. Network with other students and investors and wholesalers and learn. The best way to do this is be willing to share what you know. And be willing to help others. The more you help others the better off you will be. Remember the goal is to learn how to flip houses so that you can make more money for yourself and your family. The goal is financial freedom. Every single student wants the same thing. Remember that some people have better skill sets than others in certain things. Be willing to help others and you will see that other people are willing to help you. You can’t learn how to wholesale and fix and flip houses in a vacuum. Your family and friends won’t understand. You won’t be able to share with them your new found knowledge and eagerness to quit the “rat race”. You will feel alone. You will want to give up. Or you will not give it your 100% effort unless you surround yourself by like minded people. That is the concept of the mastermind which was developed by Napoleon Hill – the author of Think and Grow Rich. If you can afford to do so, sign up for our Advanced Training Inner Circle Mastermind Programs.

LISTEN TO THE INVESTING IN REAL ESTATE PODCAST

I record new podcast episodes every week. You can listen to these podcasts on your smart phone when you exercise or go to the gym, or you can turn your car into a mobile university and listen on your commute to and from work. I drop a lot of nuggets of information about wholesaling and flipping houses on these podcasts. Your learning curve will be shortened substantially if you listen to the Investing In Real Estate Podcast.

SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOU TUBE CHANNEL

I update my YouTube Channel with new videos on a weekly basis. I have videos of myself in the field, with students doing deals and talking about different topics related to investing in real estate. You can subscribe to my You Tube Channel by clicking on the image below

SET UP A PHONE TRACKING SYSTEM

It doesn’t matter whether you use Call Rail or Smart Phone. Make sure you are using call tracking for your marketing even if the calls are going to your cell phone. You need to be able to track where calls are coming from. If you have bandit signs, a website, and direct mail then you won’t know where your calls are coming from which means you won’t be able to track your different marketing methods and how profitable they are. Keep track of your KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) since this is how you grow. If you know that your direct mail campaign cost you $1,000 and netted you $10,000 in profit then when you made that $10,000 would you not increase your mailing? Of course you would. But you need to know how much you are making with each marketing method. That is where call tracking becomes so important.

SET UP YOUR CRM SYSTEM

Whether you choose to use a CRM like REI Volution, or Investor Fuse make sure that you have a good system that you are comfortable using. You need a place to keep track of your buyer and seller leads, contractors, listing agents, bird dogs, wholesalers, lenders etc. If you start marketing to motivated sellers, even if you just mail 1,000 postcards a week that should translate into 10 phone calls a week. That is 520 leads a year. Where are you going to store all of the information about each property, the addresses, the conversations, notes, text, emails, their contact info? That is the purpose of a CRM. 90% of your deals will come from follow up so you will need to keep following up with sellers (and cash buyers). Keep track of buyers and sellers, phone call conversations, texts, emails, take notes with each phone call, add documents like the Title Pro so that you know what was said previously and you have all of the information available in one place. That is what a CRM is for and you need to have one. If you are not answering your calls yourself, then your virtual assistant or call answering service needs to have a web form to complete and the information needs to be entered into your CRM.

START MARKETING TO SELLERS WITH DIRECT MAIL

You can pull your own lists from Listsource or Listability and do the mailings yourself with our mail house that we established for our students at Lex Direct Mail System, or you can use our in house virtual assistant services to have all of your direct mail done for you. We do a LOT of direct mail for our students and they love it and it works! It’s all done for you, so if you want to get started just contact our support desk on the Facebook Group or via email at supportdesk at lexrealestategroup.com. Whether you do it yourself, or you have us mail for you, make sure you are marketing to motivated sellers. You need a constant flow of leads from motivated sellers. And direct mail is perfect for this because you can mail as much as you want based on your budget and the number of leads you think you can handle. Do you need your phones answered? We can help you with that too! We send direct mail for many of our students and if you want your direct mail campaigns “done for you” then email our support desk to find out how to get started. Make sure that you use call tracking for all of your direct mail pieces so you know which list is working best and which mail piece is getting the best response rate. If you would like to see some samples of the postcards that we mail out for our students look at this page on my website: https://www.lexlevinrad.com/postcards/

SET UP YOUR WEBSITES

You can use Investor Carrot (which I recommend and personally use with my student training’s) or any other system to create your web sites. You can even create a custom Word Press web sites for your real estate business (but this will cost you more). Either way you MUST have a website. Nothing says “newbie” like not having a website. Make sure you have a business email address with your custom domain name (I recommend that you use Google Gsuite for this). Make sure you have email signature so you look professional. Use call tracking for the phone numbers on your website so you know where your leads are coming from. If you decide to employ Pay Per Click marketing in the future then you will need to make sure that your website is good at capturing the leads and putting them directly into your CRM.

CREATE A LOGO AND BUSINESS CARD

You can go on www.upwork.com and hire a freelancer to create a business card and logo. Or you can have our in house virtual assistants do all the heavy lifting of helping you with your logo and business card design. Need to brainstorm about a business name or website domain for your real estate business? Our staff are experts at helping our students with domain names, websites, logos, direct mail and any of the other resources on this page.

Bandit Sign pricing changes all of the time. Sometimes we find the best deals at Dirt Cheap Signs. Pricing also depends on the quantity that you order and if you are using single sided or double sided signs. We prefer single sided but some wholesalers swear by double sided (if you are using H Wire stakes double sided is better but we use Arrow Hammer Staplers and post on telephone poles (which works in Florida).

Order at least 100 bandit signs (18 x 24) and put out at least 25 bandit signs every Friday afternoon. Watch your phone start to ring. Don’t forget to use call tracking like Call Rail or Profit Dial for that phone number on your bandit sign. When you see how well bandit signs work you will soon be hiring a bandit sign placer to put out signs for you. Pay them $1.50 to $2.00 per sign.

CREATE AN OFFER MAKING SYSTEM

As a new real estate investor, you need to establish a daily routine. You need to have an “offer making system” in place so that you have a steady stream of new deals in your pipeline. A good place to start would be to get your real estate license so that you have access to the MLS. Then register to bid on sites like Hubzu, Auction.com, Xome.com and Hud Homestore. Don’t forget to make offers on listings that are on the MLS too! And make sure you keep an eye on those wholesalers deals that are being sent by email. You never know where a good deal might come from. If you want to up your game then consider hiring a virtual assistant to make offers for you. What could be better than having a steady stream of offers being made without YOU having to do any work? If you are not making any offers then you are not making any money. It really is that simple! Ask yourself this question: How many offers did I make last week. If the answer is zero then the amount of money you are making from real estate is also zero. THIS IS THE ONE THING THAT STUDENTS HAVE A HARD TIME WITH. STOP ANALYZING AND STOP THE PARALYSIS ANALYSIS. JUST START MAKING OFFERS. If you don’t know how much to offer then just offer a few thousand dollars below the asking price. But start making offers. The longer you wait without making offers the more likely you are to quit. I promise you that the minute you make your first offer, all your questions will start coming. And that is how you learn!

MAKE OFFERS EVERY SINGLE DAY

If you have a full time job to you show up late or do you show up on time? The same applies to investing in real estate. The only difference is that there is no one to yell at you if you don’t do the work. So take accountability for your time and make sure you give yourself a scorecard of how many offers you make per day, per week, and per month. Make a minimum of 5 offers per day (25 offers per week) or pay someone to make offers for you. If you are making 100 offers a month consistently then you should be getting at least 5% to 10% of those offers accepted. That translates into 5 to 10 houses that you can wholesale or flip. Each house could be $20,000 or more of profit. That means you could be making $100,000 per month flipping houses (BUT ONLY IF YOU MAKE OFFERS). I have students of mine that make $200,000 per month wholesaling. I have wholesalers in my mastermind that make $800,000 per month! Do you want to know what the difference is between them and you? THEY MAKE OFFERS EVERY SINGLE DAY. SO START MAKING OFFERS! Even better – hire a full time virtual assistant on upwork.com and have them make offers for you! Or hire someone locally and have them spend a few hours a day making offers for you. Remember if you want more deals then you need to have offers being made.

Hire someone to do all of the above (stop trading your time for a paycheck – pay someone else to make offers and get more deals)

Hire someone to put out bandit signs for you (make sure you use call tracking on the bandit signs)

Hire bird dogs and have them drive for dollars for you using the awesome app Deal Machine (use promo code FTCYXN for a discount)

Starting a direct mail campaign and mailing postcards and yellow letters to motivated sellers (we can do this for you)

Hire a cold caller to do outbound marketing for you. If you want to get sophisticated then you can set up a dialer

You can skip trace motivated seller lists and you can use Ringless Voicemail to broadcast to these people.

Search Zillow.com for motivated sellers, FSBO and pre-foreclosures

Search Realtor.com for out of area MLS listings that local realtors are not seeing

Search Craigslist for Wholesale Deals and Motivated Sellers

Put a classified ad saying “we buy houses” in your local newspaper

Ask yourself this question: “How many of the above offer making systems am I currently employing”. If your answer is zero then guess how much money you are making right now (zero). You need to take MASSIVE ACTION and do something! Start mailing out postcards, start bidding online, get your real estate license. When you take action you will start seeing results. Give yourself a 3 to 6 month learning curve and you will see magic starting to happen in just a few months. And when it does your life may change. But it will NEVER CHANGE IF YOU DO NOTHING. If the only thing you do is show up at boot camps and training events then you will FAIL.

There are so many tools and resources that I share at my boot camps and on my podcast and video training’s on the online training site and on my YouTube Channel. Just this blog on my website alone has a wealth of content (if you take the time to read it). Make sure you are tapping into all of the resources that are available to you. Make a habit of attending ALL OF THE BOOT CAMPS (and Inner Circles if you are a coaching student)and listening to ALL of the Podcast Recordings. If you are not flipping houses yet then ATTEND THE BOOT CAMP AGAIN and again until you are! Remember it’s just $97 a month to be in the Partnership Program – so you have no excuses!

If you just listen to the training’s, you will see the wealth of information that is in front of you.

and finally…….I saved the best for last. Because this is where 99% of students fail.

BE PERSISTENT

Nothing takes the place of persistence. If you have average intelligence and you are PERSISTENT and you DO NOT QUIT then you will outperform even the smartest investors out there that are too busy over analyzing and using paralysis analysis. Do not seek out perfect results. Do not wait until your “ducks are all in a row”. Just start doing. Pick up the phone and call a seller or listing agent. Put out bandit signs. Mail out postcards. Imperfect ACTION is way better than perfect INACTION. Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.

DON’T BE LAZY

Be honest with yourself. Ask yourself a simple question: “How many hours did I watch TV last week”? Then ask yourself another question: “How many hours did I spend learning about real estate, reading, listening to real estate podcasts, and educating myself”? If your hours watching TV surpass your hours of learning then YOU ARE BEING LAZY. It’s okay to be lazy. But don’t feed me your BS Story about how you really want to flip houses and you haven’t flipped a house yet. Talk to me when you are putting in 100% of your entire being into learning about real estate every single day. If you are not working or sleeping you should be learning. If you are not, then….. maybe you don’t want your life to change that badly. Maybe you love your job and never want to quit, and you are okay with never achieving financial freedom. If you want to always be broke and in debt, then just keep watching TV!

If you want to be wealthy, and you want to achieve financial freedom then you will need to SACRIFICE SOMETHING. Dump your loser friends that are a bad influence on you. Get new friends that are more successful and positive role models for you. Stop listening to “noise” on Facebook and Instagram from posers. You are the product of what you read, what you see, and what you hear. So be careful of what you read, what you see and what you listen to. You are the product of the 5 people that you spend the most time with. If those people are not who you want to ultimately emulate then STOP HANGING OUT WITH THEM. (do this part slowly). Avoid Negative people that will make you want to quit and give up on your dreams. Do not let anyone make you give up on your dreams. You deserve the best life possible! You know that family member that always has something negative to say? The one who you can’t stand seeing at the family get together? Stop talking to them! Don’t spend your weekends watching TV. Spend your weekends looking for real estate deals and putting out bandit signs. Surround yourself with positive and successful people that make you feel good about yourself and make you want you to succeed. Attend masterminds, and learn from people that are smarter than you. If you are the smartest person in the room then you are in the wrong room. Check your ego at the door. READ. Read more. Listen, Learn, Pay Attention.

And remember this…..Everything you want is on the other side of FEAR.

If you are willing to overcome your FEAR and make SACRIFICES for how you spend your time and money then there is a pay off that is HUGE down the road.

It is there if you want it.

But only If you really want it badly enough….

Enough that you are willing to stop watching TV, make new friends, invest in your education and dump the toxic negative people in your life

and while you are at it…..

You are going to need constant and consistent reinforcement. For those days where you feel like giving up.

Read books like:

“Think and Grow Rich”, “the Power of Positive Thinking”, “The Magic of Thinking Big”, “As a Man Thinketh”, and “The Laws of Success”

Read and listen to anything you can by Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie and other positive mindset thinkers

Because it all starts with how you think! It really does. And mindset really is everything. That is why I start out every boot camp with the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. Reading that book changed my life. It may change yours. I had to read it twice to understand it. Then I started listening to the audios by Napoleon Hill and I started exploring the background of the book. And once I did all this, I understood why it was the number one selling business book of ALL TIME. It is that powerful. And you probably won’t get it on the first read.

Have you read it? If not then DO THAT FIRST

If you made it all the way down here to the end of this podcast post then hopefully you are pumped to go out and DO SOMETHING? Did I wake you up from your slumber? Are you ready for change? Do you want to make more money? Are you ready to slay dragons? Are you hungry like a lion?

If you are…..

START DOING SOMETHING! TAKE MASSIVE ACTION

Start bidding on properties, mailing postcards and making offers! Get your real estate license Trust me on this one. If you just listen to what I tell you, and you do what I say you will achieve MASSIVE RESULTS